I think that Brightidea has a smart strategy for bringing social computing capabilities into the enterprise. They have picked a focused application that addresses a critical issue for any organization. Brightidea adds the capabilities of social computing to the idea generation and implementation process. Their WebStormTM product is an Idea Collection and Ranking Portal that facilitates the innovation process. It configured as the front-end interface to their Innovation Pipeline Management (IPM) platform. The IPM Platform is a suite of tools used to manage ideas from conception to reality, with modules for research collaboration, cost estimation and revenue forecasting, and other aspects of the product development process.

This week I spoke with Matt Greeley, the CEO at Brightidea. They started out in the consumer web in 1999 and moved to the current enterprise focus in 2003. While they currently work inside the firewall, some of their customers are having them reach outside to get customer and business partner input on innovation. One of the impressive uses of Webstorm outside the firewall is Cisco’s i-Prize. Here Cisco has launched a contest and invited the world to give it great ideas. The winner gets to join Cisco and is funded to make the idea real. I will cover i-Prize in a separate post, as it is a great story. Brightidea’s Webstorm manages the collection, ranking, and discussion of these ideas from over 100 countries.

Matt said they decided to put increase support around their innovation process as it is increasingly becoming a critical differentiator in today’s faster moving economy. You innovate or die. My local area is littered with companies such as Wang and Digital that failed to understand this. It is not sufficient or often feasible to just throw more people at the challenge rather companies should evaluate how technology can help. Since innovation is, in reality, a social process, it makes sense to apply social computing capabilities to this issue. Matt said that their research indicates that they are the first in this space with a comprehensive social computing solution. Here is the landing page of one of their innovation networks.

Here is a screen shot of an idea list.

Matt indicated that they also selected a specific business process so they could show concrete and measurable value for a social computing application. This struck a strong chord within me as I have been promoting a similar concept for knowledge management for years. I think that for most new IT applications to succeed they need to be tied to real business problems within real business processes and then measured by how they effect these processes.

One of the examples I used to use for the need for concrete business measures was ironically in the innovation process. In 2000 I helped develop an enterprise portal for Sainsbury’s, the UK consumer food chain. The first application within the portal served their innovation process. It was the most pressing business challenge they faced at the time. We used such measures as decreased time to market, number of first to market ideas, product success rates, etc. We used the relatively primitive portal and content management technology of the day. While it was successful, I wish we had Brightidea and social computing then. Matt said they and their clients are now looking at such measures as time to market, time to decision, value of the total innovation pipeline, and on schedule product launches. Their customers are taking these results to the Wall Street analysts to demonstrate the progress they are making in innovation and the projected future value of the company.

The controlled transparency offered by the social computing capabilities within Brightidea helps moves things along. Those who need to know, now know. Those that do not need to know are not distracted. There are dashboards that senior executives can use to monitor progress of their new product pipeline and apply resources where needed. Transparency leads to accountability and this can lead to productivity if managed in a supportive manner. Many of their clients previously used siloed applications such as Excel and now they have much greater access to knowledge and the ability to provide input throughout the product development is dramatically increased. There are likely a number of paths to taking enterprise 2.0 within organizations. I think that Brightidea is traveling down one of the most promising ones.